2 Reasons You Should Rethink Your IaaS Go-To-Market Strategy

By David Stephens, Senior Market Development Executive for SoftLayer, Ingram Micro

IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) is proving to be a leading service within the exploding cloud computing market. Gartner, for example, predicts that IaaS will achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41.3% through 2016, the fastest growing area of public cloud computing the research firm tracks. As would be expected, the market has been flooded in the past few years as established IT giants (e.g. IBM, Microsoft) and startups (e.g. ProfitBricks, CloudSigma) alike have come out with IaaS offerings. Sadly, many cloud service providers (CSPs) and MSPs view all IaaS offerings as merely compute (i.e. CPU), storage, and network resources (e.g. RAM) commodities with no real differentiation from one to the next.

In 2014, research firm IDC dug a little deeper into IaaS and found some significant differentiators that led it to rank IBM SoftLayer as the top performer. Clearly this report wasn’t weighing the most popular IaaS companies or Amazon and Microsoft would have been on the list. What IDC ultimately based its decision on was its audience’s (comprised of 402 cloud buyers) response to the question, "Please select the top 3 vendors that you believe can provide infrastructure as a service (IaaS), for private and/or public, most effectively, whether or not you currently utilize these services from third-party providers."

Following are two important (and little known) differentiators affirming IDC’s discovery and explaining why this is such a big deal for you and your customers.

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